City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting coloured students.
But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
a Kansas town.
The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
honour or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his
office punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to
dinner at five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office
before they could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were
no others in all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a
high hat to church--where for ten years he was the only male member of
the Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether
he was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which was passed
about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never
knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in
the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin
went out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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